The Separation of Work and Life

To illustrate complex issues, I frequently draw on the work-life balance as a relevant and timely problem affecting virtually everybody. Usually, conversations are about how to find effective private strategies and good public policies to facilitate an individual and sustainable balance between the two parts of how people spend their time: work and life. There are many different practices applied or perspectives taken, and, for the sake of complexity, I would like to add another question: Is a separation of work and life always meaning- or purposeful (another more logical question would be, if comparing work and life is somewhat similar to make a distinction between apples and fruits…)?

By using the expression "work-life balance", we are implicitly relying on the idea that work and life are something different, something separated from each other. Aside from the logical fact that life includes work, I think it is a worthwhile exercise to question this tacit assumption of a dichotomy between those domains. Quite often, the separation of work and life is regarded as healthy or generally good in an imperative and moral manner. "You should enjoy your leisure time!" or "Could you please stop talking about work during your recreational activities?" are common expressions in this context. I hope that the pressure to enjoy one’s leisure time is not as high as the pressure to separate work and life…

My point is that life and work cannot easily be separated. Do you think that activities like working, living, loving, being a soccer fan, having your friends’ messages on your mobile, chatting privately during work time, having a swim during lunchtime, and so on, are easily separated into the work-life dichotomy? The domains of work and life influence each other and we are not machines being able to throw a lever to shut off life while working.

If the domains of work and life interact, why do we always assume that work negatively affects life? Could it not be that work is positively affecting life, for example by giving meaning and sense through purposeful actions? Many persons define themselves through their professions, while having their personal identities at stake when talking about work.

I think the best way to think about the relationship between work and life is to perceive these two domains as mutually supportive. Bringing in parts of one’s personal skills and knowledge, personalities, even problems, into the work domain enriches the professional environment. On the other hand, there is also a transfer of professional benefits to worker’s private lives. Competencies learned during working time can be used quite effectively in different settings related to the private domain.

Therefore, a separation between life and work does not further the search for a meaningful balance between the two domains. In my opinion, the two domains have to be integrated into a holistic perspective that brings in the best of both worlds under a common purpose. Life will be much easier and more meaningful if we do not have to separate work and leisure time obsessively. 

Awareness and simplification: The KONY 2012 campaign

To increase the awareness level of a message, advertisers and campaign managers know well about the psychological effects of simplifying matters on people’s attention. Short communications are persuasive and affect people’s readiness to engage in different kind of actions. However, short communications have to simplify complex topics an may lead to the problem of not taking into account the entirety of a complex problem, for example by focusing only on a specific relationship among many affected interest groups. To avoid a misleading reduction of complex issues, I argue that the intention to increase the level of people’s awareness by simplifying communications should be accompanied by a careful consideration of the corresponding impacts in a more fine-grained stakeholder network. An insightful example is the viral campaign KONY 2012, which entered the social media in early March 2012.

The core of the KONY 2012 campaign is a short film created by the non-profit organization Invisible Children, Inc. The film documents the brutal abduction and cruel abuse of children by Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to use them as child soldiers in an ongoing conflict in northern Uganda. The LRA is a guerilla group and its leader, Joseph Kony, was indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in 2005, but still has evaded capture.

 

The KONY 2012 short film spread virally in the World Wide Web, mainly through social media channels like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and Twitter. Within a month the clip had been viewed more than 90 million times and the social media campaign raised a tremendous awareness all over the world. Celebrities and politicians started to support the concerns of Invisible Children, Inc. to bring Joseph Kony to justice.

However, criticism about simplifying the complex conflict in northern Uganda arose shortly after the film’s release. Invisible Children, Inc. was accused of providing a black-and-white picture of the situation and of manipulating the public opinion. For example, the film suggests that violence in northern Uganda will come to an end and the abducted children will be able to return to their families as soon as Joseph Kony would be captured. Of course, Kony is a dangerous and cruel individual and bringing him to justice would be important. But reducing the problems in northern Uganda to the faith of Joseph Kony is deceptive. The history of the conflict is far more complex and includes many other interest groups like, for example, the Ugandan army and government, of which many seem highly suspicious too. Further, the film neglects the fact that most LRA forces, including Joseph Kony, fled northern Uganda in 2006 to be dispersed now across three neighboring countries.

 

As the example of KONY 2012 shows, awareness and simplification have to be balanced so that creators of social media campaigns are able to achieve their objectives and at the same time meet their responsibility towards other stakeholder groups affected by complex problems. The narrow spotlight on Joseph Kony led Invisible Children, Inc. to donate funds to support military action for capturing the LRA leader. But what about the rehabilitation and reintegration of former child soldiers as another affected interest group?

Ties that bind

Recently, I had a talk with a catholic priest about people’s participation at the Mass. Not surprisingly, he told me about the continuously declining numbers of participants, but he was more worried about the decreasing level of general social participation in his parish. As a matter of fact he pointed out the additional problems of recruiting or retaining members of various parish-related associations like charities, youth, hiking or card playing groups. In his opinion this phenomenon was not basically a question of religious faith, but mainly one of individualism. As people want to take their lives in their own hands and like to organize more and more aspects of their lives individually, they make ever less use of the parish’s social offerings. Again, this is not a new insight, as Robert Putnam (2000) described in his seminal work “Bowling Alone” various aspects of the American community (political, civic and religious participation, workplace connections etc.) and its decreasing level of social activity or, as he named it, social capital.

I am asking myself what the consequences of this shrinking in social capital are for people’s willingness to participate in collective actions regarding social issues. Let’s take the steadily increasing disparity of incomes and wealth in most of the Western countries as an example: “We are the 99 percent” is one of the corresponding “Occupy”-movement’s slogans. But why are those 99 percent not able to trigger any societal change regarding fairness in the dissemination of income and wealth? “No, we can’t!” seems to be the more adequate slogan.

I think that individualism is part of the problem. If people are striving for their own personal goals, they are not really organized regarding the pooling of shared interests in the context of a social issue. Further, people’s membership in and their feeling to belong to associations, unions and other social groups fosters the development and maintaining of shared values, norms and interests in the context of a social issue. Therefore, not only personal relationships, but also memberships in social groups lead to ties that bind among people.

One possibility to approach a social issue is a stakeholder network. Especially regarding complex social issues for which cooperation among the affected actors is needed to create sustainable solutions, stakeholder networks are a promising organizational form. However, even if stakeholder networks have proved their potential to create value regarding a complex focal social issue, they are no panacea. Stakeholder networks depend heavily on the knowledge and skills of the different stakeholders’ representatives participating in the problem-solving regarding the focal issue at hand. Therefore, through the interactions of representatives in a stakeholder network, the corresponding shared values, norms, and interests regarding the social issue are emerging. These personal interactions, in the sense of people for people, are important for creating sustainable solutions in complex issue-based stakeholder networks.

Stakeholder networks and its organizational form create social capital by supporting two different kinds of ties that bind. On the one hand, there are the already mentioned interactions among representatives of different stakeholders. On the other hand, shared values, norms and interests provide the social glue among individuals. This glue is needed to address complex social issues like the increasing disparity of incomes and wealth.

Tom Schneider